


step into the future

by minna



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, F/M, M/M, One-sided feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 16:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minna/pseuds/minna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hatched for each other, you would say, and make a diamond with your hands.  She'd smile and repeat it back, but as time went on her smile got more strained, the diamond briefer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	step into the future

**Author's Note:**

> ♥beckah♥ thank you for making this suck way less than it otherwise would have

She doesn't laugh like other people do. A side effect of spending her entire life underwater; the cuttlefish would startle at normal laughter, so she'd developed the habit of trilling in amusement instead, to avoid upsetting 'sweet fis)(, cutest fronds!'

You just want to lie down with her, bury your face in her lap and sleep. She used to sing to you sometimes, cuttlefish glowing in harmony.

All your loyal subjects a the sea, you would tell her, voice slow with contentment, and she would hum.

Best beloved, she would call you, fingers floating gently through your hair, pale as t)(e moon

You love her in a helpless sort of way; land-dweller caught in a rip, dragging you far away from safety.

Hatched for each other, you would say, and make a diamond with your hands. She'd smile and repeat it back, but as time went on her smile got more strained, the diamond briefer. So you grabbed at her, tried to tie her to you with dangerous dreams and pathetic confessions, greedy and scared and awful; _pity me, steady me, love me. I need you, don't leave me._

But she did, and at her very first chance. You can't turn back t)(e tide, —Eridan, she used to tell you, first fondly and later with exasperation, some t)(ings are just beyond our control!

Suddenly you miss the sea so badly that your throat hurts with it, sandy and awful.

Your name is ERIDAN AMPORA, and you're not good enough.

*

For a while even after she broke up with you, you held onto your relationship with Feferi as a way you had measured up, even if just for a little while. You were her moirail for years; beautiful, complicated Fef, heir to the title of Condesce, leader of all, had come to _you_ with her problems, had looked to _you_ for reassurance and friendship.

But in the veil you saw what a real moirailship looked like in close quarters, and that knowledge fell through a hole in your stomach, leaving nothing but bitterness and an even larger emptiness behind. Because even that one thing you'd held on to, that one thing you'd done right you _hadn't_ , and you can see it in how joyous she is with Sollux, how grateful she is for his ear as she chatters about everything, about nothing, while he mostly just listens, that little more openly interested than he is with anyone else.

It's mostly about grabbing desperately at anyone because even the worst food is a feast to a hungry man and you are _starving_. You're christened the Prince of Hope and it's so cruel, yet another joke at your expense for them to laugh behind their hands about, these enemies of yours, these friends. You're so painfully aware of how ridiculous you are, a parody of yourself as you grub at the slightest glimmer of importance; you know they don't want you, you _know_ that if your options were reduced to these 11 then you may as well save the drones a culling and take care of it yourself but you can never seem to quite help it. Can never seem to quite silence that reedy voice of hope, that tiny whispering 'maybe'.

And so you have become a parody of yourself, your pathetic grasping at Feferi widening to an even more desperate grasping at _anyone_ , reduced yet again to the most pathetic of bottom feeders, grubbing through the dirty seafloor for the barest scrap of attention.

T)(ey're important, —Eridan, the sea N—E—EDS t)(em! And you're important too! —Everyfin has a porpoise, even if it doesn't S—EAM like it straig)(t away!

Most people don't have this desperate urge to reach inside themselves and rip everything out, and the ones who do have better reasons for it. Karkat has something going on that nobody acknowledges but everyone knows, and Sollux has _two fucking brains_ amongst the slew of mutations that would have seen him culled years ago if psionics weren't such a big deal, hissing voices of the dead and a matesprit deceased and unfeeling.

You know there's no hope here, not for any of you, stuck on this glubforsaken rock until the fast approaching end of your collective days, reason enough for anyone to fall apart.

It pre-dates the meteor though, a nasty weed with sweeps to take proper hold, appearing back when there was a future of privilege and comfort secured before you by your position in the haemospectrum, spread wide and rolling before you with a lifespan that held promise of being long enough to see through anything you might wish to accomplish, but all you could see was long years of nothingness.

It ate at you. Only you felt no right to it, to that roiling emptiness that wouldn't let you go; an emptiness you're still eager to fill with something, someone, in the hope it will bank the desire to burn everything to the ground for having the audacity to exist, to destroy the universe for daring to have you in it.

On some level, probably the most important one, you know very well that the haemospectrum is mostly bullshit, but it's also the only thing you really have going for you. In all of your arguments with Feferi, you've held back your final reasoning, the hold-out that always reduces it to a 'mostly'.

You've never said, the haemospectrum must havve some vvalue, if it puts you at the top.

*

She's been the centre of your world since you were old enough to visit her hive, just under a sweep from pupation and so excited to meet another troll.

She's not that wide-eyed little girl any more, trilling behind her hands as though surprised by her own bright laughter, dimpled elbows and breathless excitement for the next instalment of stories you made up on the spot just for her, meandering tales of dastardly pirates, brave princes and beautiful princesses.

W)(y does t)(e PRINC—E always get to do t)(e rescuing? W)(y can't the princess rescue )(IM for once?

princes are disposable fef, if theyre not gonna rescue the princess whats the use a them?

She wrung her tiny hands; she'd been so much smaller than you then, tiny and delicate, an impression you'd never quite shaken.

I don't t)(ink t)(e prince is disposable! she'd told him fiercely, any princess w)(o would leave )(er prince to pirates isn't wort)( )(er weig)(t in s)(ells!

She'd spent the next five sweeps saving you, but even the bravest princess gets tired and you're a heavy burden to bear.

*

The grey of the meteor gets to you. All of the most positive parts of your life have been colourful, and so you'd worn both your own purple and the blues of the sea like armour; flair to give you confidence, cape and scarf flapping in the wind and swirling in the water, deflecting, absorbing, distracting. Here there is nothing but stark grey metal, and you feel it rubbing off on you, heavy and lifeless.

You've been on land exclusively since the very first hours of the game, and it's beginning to disorient you, existing entirely without the gentle pull of currents, unable to catch your breath with only two dimensions of movement.

It's not like you were ever in the water much, but you're still adrift somehow in its absence. LOWAA was rife with saline canals and aqueducts, a spidering network you could have spent all of your time in if you so chose, but you had only made the mistake of entering it once.

The whispers of your consorts were clearer underwater.

There's only one person who could possibly understand the still ache of its absence, and so you seek her out again. Before the meteor she'd barely been dry in her life, but there she is, ensconced and chattering happily beside Sollux as though it's all a grand holiday. At least, until she catches sight of you, and the happiness sinks away.

W)(at is it, —Eridan?

She knows you well enough to be aware that ignoring you is pointless, but her voice drags under the weight of resignation.

 _He_ doesn't acknowledge you immediately, as though your presence can be negated through sheer force of will. It's isn't calm, just the absolute stillness of uncaring, and it enrages you. His unfeeling reactions make you look ridiculous, and you know it.

Anything would be better than what you have now, even a truly platonic hate as long as long as it was fierce. There's nothing worse to you than his indifference.

So you abandon the comfort you came looking for to bluster and poke at that indifference until it steps up to annoyance. You want to bathe in that irritation, draw it out until it jumps to anger, flows into hate, a tiny trickle of stream you're desperately trying to force to meet the sea.

Feelings are messy and complicated. You're not entirely sure how you want this to end, what your idea of happily ever after looks like, except that they both be moored firmly to you, never to leave.

You lie to yourself, that you'll do better, that you'll get a reaction, and you know you're lying to yourself but eventually it'll build up too high and the desperate wish for it to be true will outweigh that sick knowledge. So you'll try again.

okay okay get off my fuckiing bulge about iit already jegu2 fuck, anythiing iif iit mean2 you'll leave u2 the fuck alone for a liittle whiile

*

What you had with Vriska was a joke, like comparing the squeals of three sweep old wigglers telling each other stories to adult fears; the difference between tiny giggles and cheap thrills as sunrise creeps over the horizon and the sickening lurch and cold static of realising a wound is fatal.

This marks the second time you've managed to push him into an open duel, but it's only been four minutes and Ahab's Crosshairs clatter useless to the ground for him to kick away, a firm hand crushing about your throat, the disorientation of being forced suddenly to the ground. His claws dig in where they splay down your neck, perilously close to the flutter of gills unused to the cold, canned air.

He scrapes over-long, sharp canines down your jaw and you think _no wait_ , because it's nothing like your previous black crushes and flirtation, which are rapidly coming into sharp focus as dramatic play-acting, meaningless and not threatening at all.

But you didn't know, because the feeling may have been small but so were you, and even though you've grown this outstrips you, the way he casually and unwittingly stains your entire world a feverish pitch.

He's _sharp_ , made entirely of the edges of not enough food and too little sleep, soft arms with pointed elbows, sleepy and dangerous. He's so sharp in thought and deed you come away from every interaction covered in a different iteration of those self same tiny slices. Given time, you think, he could carve away the worst of you, leave you bleeding and new.

Wwait, sol -

2ometime2, I thiink you keep carpiing on thii2 precii2ely becau2e you know ii'm not iintere2ted.

No, I -

2top a2kiing for 2omethiing you can't handle, ed

His eyes have a petroleum sheen to them, juvenile black slowly fading out to make way for the gloss of adult colour. Your own are beginning to burn.

He doesn't even bother to crow, is the worst part. Just slips his glasses back on and walks away, and the scald in your throat is the worst it has ever been.

Not all of wwear our self hatred on our fuckin sleevves, you call after him bitterly. He doesn't stop. Feferi is standing at the door, face schooled into stillness -a stillness you _helped her_ achieve, years past -and deliberately does not spare you a glance. When she puts her hand forth to take his, it shakes a little.

It's not that he's objectively better -that would be hard, but you would deal with it -but instead that you're emotionally compromised and he '(doe2n't) giive a shiit'. You both already knew that, though. Which somehow makes having the point proven even harder to swallow.

*

Soon, you will shroud yourself in the pride that is never far from hand, and return to the lab with hauteur pulled shakily into place. You will troll one of the humans, pester Kanaya into alchemising the Empiricist's Wand. Right now, however, you lay staring at a featureless grey ceiling, wading slowly through endless vinegar regrets. There's a new ugliness coiling through it, which you won't examine just yet, but it's building to a terrible epiphany beneath your tongue.

Everyone had something to learn from the game, and the titles both in name and bestowed abilities are part of that.

Soon, you will think

maybe the problem is that i'm not supposed to be holding on to hope

maybe wwhat i'm supposed to learn is how to givve it up

.

.

.

.

.

[What would you say if I said a vengeful boy on a path of nihilism was taken under the wings of fearsome angels, and learned to destroy hope with their light? ]


End file.
